Mine is the last generation to have grown up entirely without the Internet.

For those of us who have made reading and the life of the mind it engenders not only a part of our learning and working lives, but also a treasured recreational pleasure, that’s a matter of some consequence. It probably divides our mental lives and, perhaps, our deliberative thinking from the young people coming after us.

I first became aware of this some years ago, when accompanying my son and his friends to the movies, and it dawned on me that our conceptions of narrative differed in a fundamental way. Those of us who grew up reading — and who experience film through a sensibility shaped by that history — automatically defer to what we discern as the intentions of the author or filmmaker. For us, the narrative and its meaning are something received. We may argue about what the creator intended, but we’re agreed that there is something fixed to be discovered. My son and his young friends — their perceptions shaped by immersion in the contingent digital world of the net and, particularly, video games, have an elastic notion of narrative. Coming out of a film, they don’t ask each other what they thought of the ending, but instead trade notions of alternative conclusions or plot twists: “Wouldn’t it be cool if instead of doing that, they did this?”

Despite the staggering disruption created by the digital revolution in the mainstream American media, where I’ve made my living for nearly half a century, I’m not one of those who wishes the Internet never happened. First of all, what’s the point? Moreover, the web has been a tremendous force for convenience and good, one I use every day for research, information and commerce. I think, though, that its benefits are overestimated by Internet triumphalists and its problems too casually overlooked.

With the ubiquity of hand-held devices and tablets, users — which includes most of the young — are constantly in touch, constantly consuming video and music. What’s being lost in all this connectivity and simultaneity is the habit of solitude and the reflective silence it makes possible, conditions most of us deem essential for deep reading. Cognitive neuroscientists point out that our brains are not naturally hardwired for silent reading, but have adapted to it over the centuries — and not many of those, if you consider the long history of writing that stretches back to the libraries of ancient Sumer.

For most of that history, reading was something done aloud. Ancient manuscripts were written in scripta continua, that is, without space between words, punctuation, capitalization or paragraphing. Writers simply assumed that artful readers would supply meaning and emphasis when declaiming the work aloud. (It didn’t always work, though, and the Latin poet Martial complained: The verse is mine; but friend, when you declaim it/It seems like yours, so grievously you maim it.)

In the fourth century, the scholar and teacher we would come to know as Augustine records in his “Confessions” great astonishment when, upon meeting Ambrose, he found Milan’s formidable Christian bishop reading in total silence. “When he read,” Augustine wrote, “his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.”

Anxious to fix the meaning of scripture against disfavored interpretations, the church fathers promoted the use of punctuation, which is thought to have been first conceived by scholars in the now lost Library of Alexandria. The monastic scribes of medieval Ireland seem to have sealed the practice when they inserted not only capitalization and punctuation, but grouped related sentences into blocks of text. Widespread silent reading, then, has been with us for a bit over 1,000 years, but the history of written texts stretches back to ancient Sumer and the 30th century BCE — more than three times as long. In all likelihood, the storied libraries of Alexandria and the Sumerian city states were filled with noise, rather like the heads of our interconnected, digitally obsessed young people today. There’s no getting away from the fact, though, that much of we value about our social and political culture is rooted in silent reading. Neuroscientific studies also seem to show that knowledge acquired by silent reading from physical texts is better retained than that gained on digital media.

Marketing researchers report that adult Americans now spend more than seven hours per day on desktop and mobile devices, and they believe that young people under 25 spend even more time. Cognitive neuroscientists think they’re seeing a new and distinctive kind of nonlinear reading emerge among young people as a result. Silent readers are instinctually linear thinkers because they habituated to gleaning information when one page leads to another, and much that we value follows from that. A couple of decades of ever-more-enmeshing digital living may be creating a new reading circuitry in our young people’s brains — one that’s transforming the adaptations of more than millennia at stunning speed.

“The Internet is different,” the Washington Post recently noted. “With so much information, hyperlinked text, videos alongside words and interactivity everywhere, our brains form shortcuts to deal with it all — scanning, searching for key words, scrolling up and down quickly. This is nonlinear reading, and it has been documented in academic studies. Some researchers believe that for many people, this style of reading is beginning to invade when dealing with other mediums as well.”

Andrew Dillon, a University of Texas professor who studies reading, told an interviewer, “We’re spending so much time touching, pushing, linking, scroll­ing and jumping through text that when we sit down with a novel, your daily habits of jumping, clicking, linking is just ingrained in you. We’re in this new era of information behavior, and we’re beginning to see the consequences of that.”

“I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing,” Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist, told the Post.

In fact, many literature professors — including those at leading universities — now say they’re reluctant to assign their students such canonical writers as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Henry James because the complexity of their sentences baffles young people raised on the web.

Our nonlinear, digitally literate young people doubtless will discover their own stories and poetry, because the need for both is basic to our humanity. Still, something many of us would deem deeply humanizing is lost when solitude and silence are lost from our lives, for they’re where both wisdom and the imagination, as we’ve long understood them, find their purchase. So, too, with deep reading. A world without James or Joyce seems an impoverished place to me.

Tim Rutten is a columnist for the Los Angeles News Group. ruttencolumn@gmail.com.